Use your smartphone or tablet to explore a 360º aquarium on YouTube

The gyroscope in your device is used to move and rotate the environment in the video.

Last year, YouTube updated their website to include 360º video playback. This was generally received with little fanfare as there just wasn’t much 360º content out there. But now, a year later, new videos are slowly beginning to appear, and the results are astounding.

If you were to view a 360º video on a regular computer browser, you don’t see anything special. It’s a weird, blurry and skewed experience as computer browsers don’t support them. They will work on the latest version of Google Chrome, but ultimately it’s an experience best viewed on a mobile device.

In order to be whisked off into a 360º world, you need to view it from your smartphone or tablet device (anything that has a gyroscope in it). When you play back the video, you move your device as if you’re using it as a camera. Whichever direction you point it, the world on-screen moves with it. It’s an incredibly effective and immersive experience. In the future this could be used to live stream events or take you on a safari through the Serengeti.

For now, we only have a small selection of videos but hopefully as 360º cameras become more affordable, the number of videos will increase.

Here’s a couple more examples of how some people are using the new virtual reality technology: